Failed nerves and the problem of religion on the american left, the partisan review, 1935–1962

Abstract

Abstract ‘What must we do to be saved?’ asked critic Dwight MacDonald after the fall of France, in the late spring of 1940.1 MacDonald was one of the most prominent of the ‘New York Intellectuals’ a name given to a group of left-wing radicals associated with the journal Partisan Review. In the 40s and 50s it was the leading modernist journal of literature and ideas in the US. Often between the 40s and 50s these Intellectuals posed the Philippians jailer's question, this was because the Second World War and the Cold War had reopened questions they thought had been resolved. Again they questioned the possibility of socialism, the problem of religion, and the future of Western civilisation itself. In this situation of fundamental crisis, American radical intellectuals struggled to defend an embattled West and at the same time work for a just and progressive moral order.